May 6 (Bloomberg) - Startups that have hit the ground running in image generation Recraft announced the completion of a $30 million (note: current exchange rate is approximately RMB 217 million) Series B round ofFinancingThe round was led by Accel, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Madrona, among other investors. Recraft, based in San Francisco, USA, previously raised $12 million in Series A funding in 2024 led by Khosla Ventures. Currently, the company has achieved over $5 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) and has 4 million users.
Recraft's image generation model "red_panda" outperformed OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney in last year's Artificial Analysis benchmark.The model is the third generation of Recraft's product, named after the cute little panda images that its early users used to generate. The model is Recraft's third-generation product, named after the adorable images of red pandas that were frequently generated by early users.Recraft's founder and CEO, Anna Veronika Dorogush, says the company built its model from the ground up to compete with Midjourney, Adobe Firefly, Stable Diffusion and Black Forest Labs, among other image generators.
Recraft's AI technology is particularly good at generating imagery for brands, placing brand logos precisely where they need to be without additional editing, while also making it easy to generate marketing materials, such as brochures and posters, that conform to existing brand guidelines. This is an area where existing image models often fall short, Dorogush noted, and puts Recraft somewhat in competition with tools like Canva that have brand design capabilities.
Recraft's founder, Dorogush, is a female entrepreneur who, prior to founding Recraft, worked in machine learning at Russian search engine giant Yandex, as well as at Google and Microsoft. Dorogush was a professional model in college while pursuing degrees in math and computer science. Although she eventually left the modeling industry, the experience taught her that hard work alone is not enough to succeed.
"That experience taught me that hard work isn't everything," says Dorogush, "and now in starting the company, I know that to be successful we have to excel at critical tasks. For us, building models is critical, so we go all out and strive to be the best at it."